It was my first time to cut EJ’s hair. With this lock down, I am forced to do it. Seriously though, I haven’t tried cutting anyone’s hair before. I haven’t tried event cutting mine or my daughters.
With this lock down though, my husband’s hair has grown really long. Cutting your husband’s hair while on quarantine now becomes necessary. Zeeka hates it when her daddy’s hair is long. haha! EJ has thick hair, too, so he’s been complaining that it has become itchy when the edges touches his ear. He hates it now also when the hair covers his eyes.
So obviously since he can’t cut his own hair, I had to do it.
The How-To’s of Cutting your husband’s hair while on Quarantine
I had a comb, scissors and body hair trimmer at home. We didn’t have clippers so we thought this would work. It didn’t though as you’ll see in the video.
So to prepare for this, I watched youtube videos the night before. They looked all so easy, so that helped me muster up the courage to do this.
I had my husband sit on a chair. We had a huge mirror in our condo so I had him sit facing the mirror. Turned off the fan so that the hair wouldn’t scatter all over the place. We also cut a hole in a garbage bag and used it to catch the hair.
Some people use a towel, by the way.
To start, make sure you know where his hair parts. This is very important since you don’t want to cut too much of the hair that it looks really terrible when he parts it up.
I learned from how women color hair and from videos that you should cut hair in sections. Start from the back (nape of the neck). Run your hand up while trying to catch hair between your fingers.
Start cutting your husband’s hair in snippets. Don’t cut a huge chunk of hair. What I did, since I was still scared at first is to start with small really small sections,. When I was more confident and “sort of” saw the shape already, I started cutting bigger chunks of hair.
I did this for the back and the sides (near the ears). I found the section near the ears to be the most difficult.
As for the bangs, just trim his bangs. What I did was to comb it on how he usually has it and just see if there are sections that are super long. I cut it to the point that it just doesn’t touch his ear when he combs it to the side.
Comb his hair one more time to see if any hair is out of place. Don’t be too OC when doing this since you may cut off his too short (cutting more than what you envision).
Have you tried doing this? If you have tips for the next time I cut his hair again, share them with me in the comment section below! 🙂
I joined a webinar recently to talk about COVID19, the impact that we all think it has on SMEs, professionals and freelancers. I was asked the question: What do you think the short and long term effects of Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) are to SMEs.
I just wanted to share my thoughts on this so that MSMEs and start-up founders like me can reflect and plan accordingly. If you want to add to the list, please feel free to comment on the comment section below.
Short Term effects of Enhanced Community Quarantine on Businesses
These are what I personally think the short term effects of this quarantine period are:
Feel a huge impact on their Cash Flow. Most of the businesses, no matter the size, are living from paycheck to paycheck. This is where we will feel the full effect of not saving up for a rainy day (Yes, as a business, we should also have an emergency fund or plan to maintain business operations and pay our commitments).
For our personal finances, we always talk about emergency funds and having enough to sustain us when unforeseen events happen. This should also be the case for SMEs. But since not a lot of businesses have extra funds for an unforeseen event like this, businesses lack funds to pay their people, they don’t get to have enough funds for the bills that they have, etc. This will result to layoffs, penalties and interests for unpaid bills or taxes, not having enough funds to pay for offices, machines, equipments, etc. Some of these companies will then have to declare bankruptcy.
Some companies will panic because they are not ready for a “work-from-home” scenario. For the longest time, our minds have been set a certain way by policies and directives about working that have been passed on from generation to generation. We think that people are more productive when they come and stay in the office from 8-5 or 9-6. There are no policies on working remotely. No policies set on which tools to use, when to use these tool, how to best use them, etc. During quarantine, most of the business owners will scramble to set up a system that will work for them “temporarily”.
It will affect people emotionally and psychologically. This isolation will get to some people. And with the news about COVID 19 and this community quarantine, it will definitely foster low moral, scare, lack of motivation due to lack of freedom (freedom that we are so used to). For business owners, some will be depressed because of the uncertainty of their businesses, thus, possibly leading to making the wrong business decision.
Long Term effects of Enhanced Community Quarantine on Businesses
The only thing constant in this world is change. So as humans, I think that we will obviously “adapt” to whatever our environment throws at us, thrive and survive. With this, we will be gunning for the “normalization” of things. We will look for ways to bring out the new “normal”.
That being said:
Businesses will be keen on visiting policies and creating new policies for situations like these. They will probably create new policies for working at home, dealing with Pandemic like this, etc.
Most companies will see that having their Employees “Work-from-Home” is actually possible. I feel that a lot of business owners will see after a while that given this kind of environment, there are some people and job functions that can really be done from home and are even more productive this way. They will also see that there are people and jobs, too, where an office setting is more beneficial. Business owners will be more open to having a more results based environment and see the value for certain types of jobs and personalities. They’ll probably be more open to hiring independent contractors and freelancers who work well in these types of environment.
Shifts in business models of some businesses. Business owners will see that there may be a few things that they need to tweak in term of how they generate revenues. For examples, a company that used to do things mostly offline, will think of diversifying and looking at other sources of revenue.
Rise of the new creators and inventors. When unforeseen situations like this happen, they become “seen” and people get to experience a different set of challenges and pain points. Some of us go the extra mile and create solutions for the things that we experience now and for the things that we wish we had at this point in time.
What can we do to battle the negative effects and stay sane?
For Business Owners and Startup Founders: Revisit your business model. Try to look for other ways you can earn. As I mentioned, it’s time to look for new ways of earning, if you aren’t really getting any revenue.
This is also the time do some “cleanups”. Clean up processes. Find ways on how to make processes more efficient. This is the time to quickly work on things that would normally get set aside.
Take care of your people. We are all new to this. As business owners and entrepreneurs, we’ve handled a lot of challenges along the way. From overcoming these things, we’ve become stronger. Let’s step up and be leaders at this time. Make your people feel safe and secure.
For employees: Take care of yourself. Even when in lock down, try to maintain a “balance” with everything that you do. It’s hard to separate working from personal time when both are done in the same environment. Try to set boundaries for each. Take breaks while working. At the same time, strive to be more productive, too, while at home. It’s hard, but you’ll get the hang of it.
To motivate you to work from home, you can (1) go back to your company’s mission and see if you can help achieve the mission that they have. In Taxumo, our mission is really to help people compute, file and pay their taxes anytime and anywhere. We are working doubly hard now to reach more people so that they don’t have to worry about paying taxes during times like these. Our government uses these (our taxes) to fund public hospitals and other initiatives that can help our countrymen in times like these.
Another thing that you can look at to motivate you is (2) look at your own personal goals. Who are you doing this for? Going back to the reason why you’re working can help you out at this time.
Let me share with you a video that I shared with some of my employees and hopefully this will help. It talks about looking for the FLOW.
We’ll all get through this. We must get through this. I still believe in the human spirit and how we can turn situations like this into something beneficial for all of us. Let’s help one another, and probably, after all of this has died down, we’ll all be super humans.
P.S. I read this article that I had written 6 years ago when I was “about” to start working from home: https://mommyginger.com/work-at-home-me.html Just brings back a lot of emotions 🙂
